The sheer volume of information provided in magazines often overwhelms a reader's ability to process it. It is typical for a single magazine to include over one hundred articles, with a dozen or more directed to a single topic. Printed indices and tables of contents may themselves run for many pages. If a reader desires to receive current information, for example, on a particular person or company, he may find a dozen references to that company or person indexed within a single magazine. Often the reader must dedicate valuable time evaluating all of the content in order to determine which of it satisfies his particular interests. A typical index only provides the page numbers where the name or company is mentioned, and typically does not describe what the article relates to or the content in which a name or company is mentioned.
Abstract services are available which produce abstracts of magazine articles covering specific areas of interest to information consumers. These abstracts are distributed in accordance with reader profiles and are used to identify articles of likely interest to the consumer. Upon request, the reader may obtain full copies of the articles. Such services suffer, however, from the obvious drawback that access to the full article requires a separate time-consuming action and a positive effort on the part of the consumer.
At least one magazine, American Baby, attempts to include custom editorial matter. Profile data is collected from subscribers for the purpose of providing targeted content to individual subscribers. If, for example, a subscriber is identified as having a three-months old infant, then an article relevant to such an infant may be specially inserted into that subscriber's magazine along with the standard content. The inclusion of that insert is noted on the cover.
Such a process suffers from the significant shortcoming of not making it any easier to find other relevant articles in the magazine. The magazine still contains hundreds of pages of standard-content information that, as described above, contributes to the information overload of the reader.